The Killer in My Eyes (25 page)

‘Miss Martini, what you have just been through was traumatic. I know how difficult it is to accept certain things, and I say that from personal experience. Your mother is a good woman and a good friend. I think you should allow me to go home to her and rest until you have healed.’

Maureen had come into the room knowing that, when she told them what was happening to her, this would be the only possible response. She couldn’t blame them. She herself would have done the same in these circumstances.

‘Mr Mayor, with all due respect, I would never have come here if I didn’t have a reasonable certainty that what I’m saying is true. I accept that the word “reasonable” may seem a bit incongruous in this case. I’m a police officer and I was trained to go by the facts, not far-fetched speculation. Believe me when I say I thought long and hard before coming here, but now that I am here I wouldn’t change my story even if challenged by a whole panel of psychiatrists.’

She stood up, feeling naked and defenceless in front of these two men, put her dark glasses back on and said the rest of what she had to say without looking at either of them in particular.

‘I’ll be staying with my mother a while longer. If you think I’m crazy, call her. If you want to give me the benefit of the doubt, call me. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’

She turned and headed for the door, leaving behind her a silence she knew was a mixture of surprise, embarrassment and compassion.

As she was about to touch the handle, her eyes fell on a photograph in a wooden frame next to the door. In it, two men were shaking hands and smiling at the camera. One she knew very well: President Ronald Reagan. The other was Christopher Marsalis, looking much younger than he was now, with dark hair and a moustache. She had not recognized him immediately because he had changed so much, but his blue eyes were unmistakable. Maureen realized in a flash that she had seen him before – not as he looked now, but as he looked in the photograph.

It was the same man who had entered the child’s room in her dream and torn up the drawing.

She spoke without turning around, afraid of the reaction on the faces of the two men.

‘A long time ago, your son was making a drawing. It was a childish but quite accurate sketch of a man and a woman making love against a table. You came into his room and he showed it to you. You got very, very angry. You tore up the paper and as a punishment shut your son in a closet.’

Only then did Maureen turn. She saw Christopher Marsalis stand up without speaking, go to the window and look out. To Maureen, his silence was more eloquent than words could ever be. When at last he spoke, his voice seemed frayed by time and memory.

‘It’s true. It happened many years ago. Gerald was a child. At that time my wife was still alive, although she’d already started going in and out of hospital. I was much younger then, of course, and because of her illness she and I had not had sexual relations for more than a year. There was this very pretty maid working in the house and I . . .’

He paused, as Maureen had expected: the usual pause before a confession.

‘It happened in the kitchen. It was an instinctive thing, and it was only that once. Gerald must have seen us without our noticing. When he showed me the drawing, he was very proud. Obviously, he hadn’t understood what we were doing. He was just delighted with his little artwork. I was afraid he might show the drawing to someone else, so I tore it up. Then I made him swear he wouldn’t tell anyone – and to make it clear to him that he’d done something wrong, I shut him in that closet. He was only a child, but I have the feeling he never forgave me.’

Maureen saw again the door closing on his anger-reddened face, and imagined the child plunged into darkness.

Jordan Marsalis came to help his brother in his moment of weakness. ‘Miss Martini, as you said before, you’re a police officer, with all that entails. I used to be a police officer too, so we both know what we’re talking about. You must admit there are unusual elements in this situation. If anything like this was used by either of us in court, we’d be forced to go for pyschiatric counselling twice a week. But I guess I have to take what you’ve told us seriously. You said there were other . . .’

Maureen realized he was struggling to give a name to something she herself could barely express in words.

‘Are you asking me if I saw anything else?’

‘Yes.’

Maureen felt a sense of liberation, as if she was at last emerging from the solitude into which all these experiences had plunged her. She started telling them about all the images that had come to her: the woman with the blue face beneath her, Gerald’s red face in the mirror, the threatening figure on the landing . . .

She was so absorbed in her story that she was barely aware of the effect of her words on the two men. When she had finished, it was the Mayor who spoke first.

‘This is crazy.’

Jordan seemed less shaken.

‘I think we ought to decide on a line of action,’ he said. ‘We have two victims. The MOs make us think the murders are linked by a number of elements we can’t yet define. The one link we’ve so far found between Gerald Marsalis and Chandelle Stuart is that both of them studied at the same college.’

He took some coloured photographs that were lying on the desk and pushed them towards Maureen.

‘Vassar.’

Maureen came over, sat down, picked up one of the photographs and . . .

. . .
I’m walking along an avenue that cuts across a large lawn. As I walk, I pass young men and women who look at me without greeting me: I don’t greet them either. In front of me there’s a big austere building, full of windows, and I raise my arm to look at my watch. Suddenly I start walking faster and then begin to run towards the entrance and
. . .

. . .
I’m in a room and my field of vision is restricted, as if the images are coming to me through holes, and apart from me there are two other people in the room, a man and a woman dressed in dark clothes and wearing plastic masks with the faces of characters from
Peanuts
. The woman is Lucy and the man is Snoopy. My heart is pounding and I turn my head to see what the other two are looking at
. . .

. . .
and there’s a man with his back to me leaning over a table where a body is lying, apparently a child, and suddenly the man lifts his arms and in his right hand he’s holding a knife that’s all red with blood and there’s more blood dripping from his hands and staining the sleeves of his jacket, and even though I can’t hear him I know the man is screaming and I
. . .

. . .
I’m still with the man and woman in dark clothes and Lucy and Snoopy masks but we’re somewhere else and the man is leaning against the wall and he takes off his mask and his face is young and tanned and streaked with tears and then he hides it in his hands and he slides down the wall until he’s sitting on the ground and the woman
. . .

Maureen was kneeling on the ground, looking at a knot in the wooden floor between two sports shoes. The shoes and the strong arms helping her up and into a chair belonged to Jordan Marsalis.

The voice was Jordan’s too, but it seemed to come from a million miles away.

‘What’s the matter, Miss Martini?’

Maureen heard another voice, from equally far away. Somehow, she realized it was her own.

‘A murder. There was a murder.’

‘What do you mean? What murder?’

She did not hear the last question. Her body gave way and she fainted. The darkness was like a lifebelt thrown by a merciful hand, before another hand – the icy hand of terror – could grab her.

When Maureen regained consciousness, she was lying on the floor, a hand supporting her head. The light hit her immediately, once more like sand in her eyes. She quickly closed them again.

‘I need my glasses.’

She reached out a hand and felt the shiny surface of the wooden floor beneath her palm, groping for her glasses, assuming they had fallen beside her when she had pitched forward. She heard a movement behind her, felt the arms of the glasses being slid delicately over her ears, and then the blessed coolness of the dark lenses. She opened her eyes and was glad the others could not see her as she did so because they were glistening with tears. She tried to recover her normal breathing and heartbeat.

‘Are you all right?’ The voice was Jordan’s.

‘Yes,’ she said.

No
, she thought.
I’m not all right at all. If this is the price I have to pay in order to see, I’d prefer to go back to the old darkness and the images of my own nightmares – and not witness someone else’s nightmares as a powerless spectator.

‘Do you want a drink?’

Maureen shook her head. The images of what she had seen were fading. Only the fear remained, like a knife in her stomach. She tried to sit up and saw Jordan’s face in front of her and smelled his breath. It smelled good and healthy, with only a slight hint of tobacco. Obviously it had been he who had supported her and laid her on the floor before she could fall headlong.

‘Help me up, please.’

Jordan put his hands under her armpits and gently lifted her back into the chair where she had been sitting when . . .

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, I’m fine now. It’s gone.’

‘What happened?’

Maureen passed a hand over her forehead. Despite what she had told the two men earlier, she could not help feeling a sense of shame for this new . . .

this new
. . .
what?

Maureen decided to call it an ‘episode’. She certainly didn’t want to use the word ‘attack’, not even to herself.

‘I saw something,’ she said.

Christopher Marsalis sat down behind the desk, facing her. ‘What?’

Maureen pointed to the photographs strewn on the table. ‘I saw Vassar. Not as it is now, but as it was some time ago.’

‘How do you know that?’

Maureen indicated the trees lining the avenue leading to the big building in the background of one of the photographs. ‘These trees were smaller when I saw them.’

‘Go on.’

‘I was there, running along that avenue in the photograph. Then suddenly I was in another place entirely. With Lucy and Snoopy.’

Still absorbed in what she had seen, Maureen did not notice the start that Christopher Marsalis gave or the glance he threw his brother.

‘Lucy and Snoopy?’ the two men said almost simultaneously.

Maureen did not catch the anxiety in their voices, only the surprise. ‘I’m not out of my head,’ she hastened to say. ‘I mean, I was with two people wearing
Peanuts
masks, specifically the characters of Lucy and Snoopy. I was wearing a mask, too.’

Jordan sat down in front of her and took her hands. ‘Maureen, sorry to interrupt . . .’

Maureen was pleased to hear him use her first name. It was familiar, it was protective, it was . . . human.

‘There’s something I haven’t told you,’ he went on. ‘Are you familiar with
Peanuts
?’

‘Who isn’t?’

‘Well, whoever killed Gerald and Chandelle left the bodies in positions similar to two of those characters. My nephew had a blanket stuck to his ear and a finger in his mouth like Linus. Chandelle Stuart was leaning on a piano like Lucy when she listens to Schroeder playing. And the killer gave us a clue that suggests his next victim will be Snoopy.’

Jordan’s voice was calm and radiated trust, and Maureen admired him for the way he managed to conceal what he must really be feeling.

‘You mentioned a murder,’ he prompted quietly.

‘Yes. In the room where we were, there was someone standing in front of a table. On it was a body – a child, I think. I couldn’t see very well because the man had his back to me and was standing between me and the table. Then he lifted his arms and in his right hand there was a knife with blood on it.’

‘And then?’

‘Then all of a sudden I was somewhere else. And the two people in the masks were there again and the person in the Snoopy mask took it off and was crying.’

‘Did you see his face?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you be able to recognize it?’

‘I think so.’

Jordan leaped to his feet, as if galvanized. He turned to his brother, who had been listening to them in silence.

‘Christopher, call President Hoogan. Tell him we need to get into the Vassar database urgently. Ask him for the password.’

Christopher immediately grabbed the telephone.

Jordan turned back to Maureen. ‘The only thing we feel fairly confident about is that this Snoopy was also a Vassar student. If that’s the case, we can try to locate him on the college database and place him under police protection, if we’re still in time.’

‘Travis,’ came Christopher Marsalis’s excited voice, ‘I’m telling you this is a matter of life and death. I don’t give a flying fuck about privacy. You want warrants, I can have a ton of warrants for you in fifteen minutes. But right now I need what I asked. And I need it
immediately
!’